It’s often said that you shouldn’t keep bananas with other pieces of fruit. Far from being an old wives tale or something crazy people scream while punching melons in the fruit aisle, this is totally true. You may think that sounds crazy but as you’ll learn if you continue to read this site, “crazy” is just an excuse people who don’t like dropping some mad science use when they don’t want to do some research.
Getting straight to it, yes, bananas will kill other pieces of fruit, or at the very least, make them ripen and rot way more quickly if put in the same general vicinity as them. This is because ripe bananas give off something called ethylene gas (most fruits produce this gas but bananas produce it much higher quantities), which makes certain kinds of fruit ripen and melt like they’ve just been soccer punted into the Arc of the Covenant. For reasons we assume are linked to bananas being assholes.
This is the reason that bananas are almost always inevitably kept away from other pieces of fruit in a store. If they were stored alongside all the apples and shit, they’d rot prematurely while the bananas ripened until the resembled a huge yellow middle finger.
Weirdly, if a banana isn’t exposed to the very gas it gives off when it’s ripe after being picked, it will never fully ripen, and thus, will never become a proud yellow fruit that you can put between your legs to pretend your dong is a Simpsons character. Instead, the banana will stay green until its insides rot away. Meaning a banana’s ability to silently murder other pieces of fruit with poison gas can be turned off. In fact, when they’re shipping bananas they purposely avoid shipping ripe bananas because they’d cause all of the other bananas to rot during transport and will then expose them to ethylene gas before they send them to stores.
What’s weirder is that if you put a banana in the fridge, its skin will turn black, while the fruit inside remains edible almost like the banana didn’t think it could freak people out enough without having the ability to change color as well as murder half of your fruit bowl.
Basically, there’s a lot of stuff you can do with a banana if you’re bored, a sentence we invite people to think is dirty, if only because a cheap laugh is good for you. Though not as good as some potassium, seriously, go eat a banana before they kill everything else!
